Monday, April 11, 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.The Rise of Confucius and Legends of Abdication in Light of Warring States Period Bamboo Manuscripts
Speaker: Sarah Allan, Burlington Northern Foundation Professor of Asian Studies in honor of Richard M. Dressler at Dartmouth College, chair of the Society for the Study of Early China, and editor of Early China
Sponsored by the Harvard University Fairbanks Center for Chinese Studies
S250, 2nd Floor, CGIS South, 1730, Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA

Subscribers to the New York Review of Books can also read Ian Johnson’s “A Revolutionary Discovery in China” in the April 21 issue, which is a review essay based on Sarah Allan’s book Buried Ideas: Legends of Abdication and Ideal Government in Early Chinese Bamboo-Slip Manuscripts.

Edward Shaughnessy (University of Chicago) who will be Halls-Bascom Visiting Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in early April 2016 will hold a Workshop on Recently Excavated Texts on 7 April 2016 from 2:30-4:30 p.m. (location on the UW Campus still to be arranged). Zhi Chen (Hong Kong Baptist University) will serve as discussant. It is hoped that scholars from other “neighboring universities” will consider joining the Workshop. Although we have no travel funds, there will be a light-dinner reception following the Workshop to allow the discussion to continue into the evening. For further information please contact Bill Nienhauser (whnienha@wisc.edu).

We are pleased to announce the programme for Trinity Term 2014 of the Interdisciplinary Workshop for Manuscript and Text Culture (WMTC) at The Queen’s College, University of Oxford. We will discuss three papers this term.

The workshops take place at The Queen’s College University of Oxford: High Street OX1 4AW (Memorial Room). Lectures are from 6-7pm followed by a discussion. All are welcome. (For more details, see here.)

This book is an analysis of religion in the Guodian manuscript the “Xing zi mingchu” 性自命出. In the Appendix, I provide an annotated translation and Chinese edition of the text. When I was in Beijing shortly after I finished writing the manuscript, I made a short movie of an exhibit of a copy of the “Xing zi mingchu” in the Confucian Temple in Beijing.

Scott Cook’s extensive, two-volume study and complete translation of the Guodian excavated texts has been published and is available through University of Hawaii Press. For more information, check out these two sites (vol. 1; vol. 2), which are largely identical but have links for purchasing the two volumes at the bottom. Congratulations, Scott!

Here follows the blurb from the website:

The cache of bamboo texts recently unearthed (in 1993) from the village of Guodian, Hubei Province, is without doubt a rare and unique find in the history of Chinese philosophy and literature. As the only archaeologically excavated corpus of philosophical manuscripts to emerge from a Warring States–period tomb, the Guodian texts provide us with a wealth of reliable information for gaining new insights into the textual and intellectual history of pre-imperial China. In this respect, one may reasonably claim that they are the most exciting thing to happen to the study of early China since the third century ad, the last time a pre-imperial textual cache of similar import was unearthed. More than a few scholars have even gone so far as to suggest that their discovery necessitates that the entire history of early Chinese intellectual history will have to be rewritten. The importance of these texts is manifold. First, given the prominence of Confucian works in the corpus, they serve to fill out much of the intellectual historical picture for the doctrines of roughly three generations of Confucian disciples who fell between the times of Confucius 孔子 (551–479 BC) and Mencius孟子 (ca. 390–305 BC). Next, the discovery of three different texts that each parallel portions of the Daodejing 道德經 (aka. Laozi 老子), along with a possibly related cosmogonic work, the “Taiyi sheng shui”太一生水, is helping us better understand the formation and early transmission of the Laozi and the nature of its relationship to early Confucian thought and even popular beliefs. Moreover, the dating of the tomb serves to dispel serious doubts about the early temporal provenance of both the Laozi and many of the chapters from the Li ji 禮記 (Book of Ritual), as well as giving us a number of clues to help us reconstruct the history of the early Chinese canonical “classics” that are cited in some of the texts. And written as they are in the local Chu 楚 script, the manuscripts hold great significance for the study of early Chinese paleography and phonology, giving us tangible examples of “ancient script” forms hitherto seen mainly in early character dictionaries and a limited array of technical manuscripts previously excavated from the region.

As many of you know, there are more and more excavated texts making their presence known in our field. Beijing University is in possession of a bamboo-strip version of the Laozi / Daode Jing that they date to the Western Han; a full transcription is available here; just scroll down past the pictures.

Bloomington, Indiana was the site of the 8th Midwest Conference on Chinese Thought, which took place last Friday to Sunday. Our hosts at the University of Indiana (primarily Aaron Stalnaker, Maichel Ing, and Cheryl Cottine of the Religious Studies Department) organized things very well. The group was small enough that everyone was able to participate, but large enough that there was a critical mass to discuss a wide range of topics intelligently. As compared with the more narrowly philosophical conferences that I have mostly been attending, there was a refreshing dose of sinology (details of texts, less-well-known authors, etc.); too bad that the AAS doesn’t seem to be more open to broad discussions of Chinese thought, because it might then be more of a forum for conversations like this one. Two of my personal highlights were Esther Klein’s paper “Sima Qian’s Confucius and the Western Han Lunyu,” which both reviewed recent research on the possible Western Han composition of the Lunyu and presented her own research into citations of the Lunyu in Shiji; and Frank Perkins’s “The Mohist Daodejing,” which explored parallels between the last 16 chapters of the Daodejing (which are unattested in the Guodian texts) and Mohism. Both papers hint at further ways in which our understanding of early Chinese thought may continue to change in dramatic ways in years ahead!

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